As we mentioned in our introduction, the focus of the PCMark series has always been on recreated real-world computing workloads, but doing so in a reproducible manner. Indeed, this 'mission statement' hasn't changed at all in PCMark Vantage, with the benchmark aiming to reproduce the varying kinds of workloads that you'd expect to see from a home user running Windows Vista, covering a gamut of functionality from 3D gaming to image manipulation, and video playback and editing through to e-mail and web browsing.

To add further granularity to the kind of testing PCMark Vantage can carry out, the application has been broken down into various 'suites' - A single, all-encompassing 'PCMark suite', which delivers an overall score which can be used in true FutureMark style to compare systems online, and various other suites with more specific workloads and computing tasks in mind.